Racepalm: That's Not The Harlem Shake, White People

Like many of you born around the time Michael Jackson started to appear looking like he could be Vanity’s first cousin, a trending topic on Twitter referencing the “Harlem Shake” threw mefor a loop, because it didn’t mirror the aggressive shoulder shimmy from the 2000s.

As in, something like the dance you see here.

Or, here.

Yeah, that’s not what this new Harlem shake is, at all. What does it look like? The kind of random hopping over a techno beat you would expect from our friends living on the lighter side of life.

But, here’s a better demonstration:

And here’s another. Was I lying? I think not.

For the record, now local news stations have gotten involved.

Let me warn you now: It’s only a matter of time before this makes its way to CNN and daytime TV. Yes, it won’t be long now before Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb are doing this on the Today show, after their seventh glass of champagne. I’d actually be here for that, but not for the dance itself.

As for how this new Internet phenomenon started, apparently we owe this trend to producer Baauer, who offered the instrumental that spawned this new, ahem, dance, last year. This has all confirmed to me that I’m entering the “get off my lawn” phase of life because not only do I not get this, I’m mad people are acting like the Harlem shake is a new thing.

Where was Matt Lauer when Diddy (then known as P. Diddy) was doing this?

Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised, at all. Harlem has been gentrified, so I suppose I shouldn’t be at all surprised that the dance itself has been appropriated, too. I call it the Andy Cohen effect, in which white people discover things we were doing or saying 20 years ago and present it to the world as brand new, given it’s new to them. It won’t be long now before suburbia gets on YouTube to declare, “The butterfly, uh, uh that’s old, let me see you tootsie roll.”

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